Nonggirrnga Marawili

Painted for Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, in 2020 (catalogue number 1151-20)

Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne (catalogue number AK22098)

Tim Klingender, Sydney, acquired from the above in September, 2020

Thence by descent to the present owner

Alcaston Gallery, Victoria, Dhalirr'yun, September 9 - October 3, 2020

The drama of the tempestuous eastern coast of Arnhem Land at the height of the monsoon season is the subject by Noggirrnga Marawili’s paintings of Baratjala, a major site of her Madarrpa clan at Cape Shield. Mundukul the ancestral Snake, creator of the wet season, who lives in the depths of the sea rises into the sky and spits bolts of lightning, ‘guykthun’, that strike the rocky shoreline as the waves rise and churn. The spray of the waters smashing against the rocks is a metaphor for foreign forces attempting to displace the ‘immovable rock foundation’ of steadfast Madarrpa law and society.

In the painting, the drama is expressed through the sharp contrast between black and white pigments, and the stark bold forms against the electric angularity of dotted and drawn lines. The term guykthun has extensive associations in the Yolngu language to encapsulate a state of transition from the mundane to the sacred through the utterance of certain words. The bolts of lightning depicted in the painting–Marawili’s adaptation of the Madarrpa clan design–are like sanctifying words spat across the sky.

Marawili was the daughter of a renowned Madarrpa warrior and clan leader whose name is synonymous with that of the ancestral Lightning Snake, Mundukul Marawili (c.1890-c.1950). While the tradition of painting on flattened sheets of eucalyptus bark was considered to be the domain of men, women of Noggirrnga’s generation were actively encouraged to continue the tradition. Her art education came via her husband, the award-winning painter Djutadjuta Mununggurrr (c.1935-1999) who she assisted in the painting of the intricate designs of his clan, the Djapu. In time, as she struck out on her own, at first as a printmaker in the mid-1990s and soon after she took up painting on bark and larrakitj (memorial poles) with variations on the patterns of her own clan, the Madarrpa.

A related bark painted of the same site of Baratjala, and made in the same year, was acquired by Tate Modern in 2022. The Metropolitan Museum holds four bark paintings from the series Lightning and the Rock, first shown at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards at the Museum and Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, in 2014, for which Marawili won first prize for paintings on eucalyptus bark, a prize she won again in August 2019.

Noggirrnga Marawili had several solo exhibitions in the last decade of her life, culminating in a major retrospective, From My Heart and Mind, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2018. Her work also featured in the exhibition Maḏayin: Waltjaṉ ga Waltjaṉbuy Yolŋuwu Miny'ti Yirrkalawuy (Eight decades of Aboriginal Australian bark painting from Yirrkala) which toured the United States from September 2022 to January 2025.¹

^

¹ See the catalogue of the exhibition: Wukun Wanambi, Kade McDonald, Henry Skerritt (eds.), Maḏayin: Waltjaṉ ga Waltjaṉbuy Yolŋuwu Miny'ti Yirrkalawuy (Eight decades of Aboriginal Australian bark painting from Yirrkala), Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and DelMonico Books, New York, 2022. The exhibition was organised by Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in partnership with the Buku Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala. It opened at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire and travelled to; the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington DC; the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach; the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and the Asia Society Museum, New York, from September 3, 2022, to January 5, 2025.